MENZ Issues: news and discussion about New Zealand men, fathers, family law, divorce, courts, protests, gender politics, and male health.

Scoop Release

The stark reality behind New Zealand’s family violence statistics has seen the emergence of a new profession — that of Child Victim Advocate practitioner. Child Advocates from around New Zealand will gather on 4 October 2007 for a Hui sponsored by the Family Safety Team (FST) initiative and supported by the Ministry of Social Development (MSD). The Hui aims to establish and maintain a national network of Child Advocates as well as to share information, debate advocacy issues and establish interest groups with particular advocacy focus.

The NSPNZ is on the march. Using the school as an entry point - now that hasn’t been done before, has it!

Let a women have her way regardless.

The flight was already 15 minutes late leaving, dogged by continual relocation of passengers to accommodate lone children. There was frustration in the tone of the flight officer’s voice as he announced a delay due to documentation. At this point one attendant was moving two passengers from one row, to seat three children together.
The bloke in the aisle seat obliged and moved to a different seat, but the women by the window – onboard emergency, warning, warning, tarmac domestic in progress, I will not be moved. At this point approaching 20 minutes late, there was distress showing on the faces of the flight crew. They gave up and put two children next to her and one next to “a man” shudder shudder. Then came that standard announcement, passengers are reminded that according to aviation law they must at all times comply the instructions of their flight crew. Perhaps it was that the plane was still on the ground, then again it could have been that a women with a window seat takes preference to airline policy and aviation law and what about customer satisfaction, very confusing.

The police shooting and killing of a man in Christchurch last night appears to be another tragic example of the DVA’s principles in action. The police were called to a domestic indicent and no doubt followed their current guidelines as demanded by feminist groups including Wimmin’s Refuge. They will have treated him immediately as a criminal rather than a distressed person and ganged up against him with the woman, ignoring any violence or provocation from her, encouraging her to use the DVA to shut him out of her life and the lives of any children, disregarding the issues and frustrations to which the man was reacting, forcing the man out of his home and generally depriving him of any sense of security, future or hope. Following this enlightened intervention by the police, the man left the house highly threatened, angry and feeling he had little left to lose. Never mind, Heather Henare will be happy to know the police then murdered him, better than most men deserve and sadly wasting four bullets in the process. They did have the decency though to apologize to the public for the inconvenience it caused to traffic flow.

An article on Campell Live on Tuesday night deserves comment. (Sorry, this video clip will only be available for a short time and I don’t currently have the skills to save the clip in a useable form).

The clip is about a 21-year-old mother in Australia who advertised for sperm and impregnated herself from a donor. She blatantly states that she wants no man in her life or father in the child’s life. She wants lots of children and has a target of 11 that she plans to produce in the same way. Of course, her choice is based on being entirely supported by the state.

In my opinion it’s a story of state-sponsored child abuse. It brought out some of the issues in a shallow way, but it’s a shame no representative of fathers’ groups was interviewed. I believe there should be a presumption of illegality for either a woman or a male donor deliberately to bring a child into the world without any intention of providing a family or any relationship with the biological father. Only in special circumstances should a Court be able to give people special dispensation to do so legally and to be entitled to state financial support for doing so.

The DPB, rather than providing basic welfare assistance to stave off starvation and exposure, has evolved to provide a viable, long-term lifestyle for women who choose to keep having babies. It has become so on the backs of men from whom the state steals in order to reimburse itself. This particular Australian woman promises not to ask for any contribution from the father, (yeah, right…) but it wasn’t made clear whether the state was extracting reimbursement from him. If not, then the woman must have been deceiving the welfare authorities in order to withhold the father’s identity, and this was ongoing because she said the father regularly contacted her to see how things were going. Regardless, someone has to pay for supporting this woman’s lifestyle, and such taxes are mainly taken from the blood, sweat and tears of men such as those who die in Australian mines.

This situation was a subset of the larger problem of state-funded child abuse. Every time the DPB encourages procreation into a situation with no father, and every time it facilitates the break up of a family unit, children are abused. In a very small proportion of such cases this may be outweighed by abuse that was occurring in the family unit, but mostly it’s just a matter of the adults seeking some elusive greater personal happiness at the expense of their children’s best interests.

The article showed how erroneous feminist ideology has so effectively become part of the average person’s belief system. Both the young woman and her mother expressed confident opinions that biological father involvement is irrelevant to children’s development. Who can blame them for believing this, given that most government policies and laws imply exactly the same? The DPB in its various forms across the developed world was introduced during an era when such beliefs seemed like common sense. Since then knowledge from research has built to show clearly that such father-marginalizing beliefs are unfounded, but DPB and child-related policies have not changed significantly. Feminism jealously guards the rights and privileges accorded to women at the expense of children’s best interests and society’s functioning.

Fathers might like to share something of their perspective on this poll being done by the Families Commission.

State funded National Radio (actually, I appreciate it immensely much of the time) broadcast an interview this morning on “research” into youth violence by Presbyterian Support researcher Sue Milligan. You can hear it for the next week on Radio NZ’s website. The research was based on 34 case studies and interviews with 40 people who worked with offending youth. This kind of qualitative research cannot properly be used to draw general conclusions about the population from which such small samples were taken. But such irritating patriarchal notions about science and knowledge did not stop Ms Milligan from blessing us with a full analysis of the relevant causes of the dramatic increase in violence and bad behaviour we are seeing in our youth (which at least she didn’t try to dismiss by quoting Aristotle). Apparently it’s all due to such factors as the stress our children endure, inadequate listening to them by teachers and parents, and the violence modelled by their families and society generally.

Of course, neither the researcher nor the interviewer thought it worth considering whether changes in discipline might have contributed to the problem. No mention was made of the banning of corporal punishment in schools and the steady deterioration in behaviour since then. The prediction that if we stop “modelling violence through physical punishment” then violence in society would disappear has been contradicted by events, but that didn’t stop the ideologues from illegalizing smacking and maintaining their over-reliance on simplistic modelling theory at the expense of other influences on behaviour such as punishment and reward.

So is this relevant to men’s issues? Very much so methinks. The idea that physical force equates to violence which is always bad is essentially a feminist ideological formulation. The role of men who can offer physical strength to intervene and to provide natural consequences for socially unacceptable behaviour has been resented and demonized, so now only uniformed agents of the state are allowed to use any such force. The demand by feminists that the state should usurp fathers’ roles (and make them pay for this privilege) required the promotion of beliefs that fathers are unnecessary and that their traditional roles in child rearing were not only useless but undesirable.

Sooner or later it will have to be acknowledged that policies based almost entirely on modelling theory are failing and that parents and teachers need the right to assert physical dominance over children at times in order to provide timely and effective behaviour-shaping consequences. We will need to recognize that pain receptors exist in part to assist in learning (hence we don’t keep touching hot objects or gorse bushes), and that a total, ideological restriction on taking advantage of pain receptors in socializing our children is foolish. We will need to realize that if people are not allowed to use physical force for responsible reasons, this will leave the violent criminals in our society much freeer to dominate the rest of us. No way will the police ever be able to replace that particular traditional male role unless every second person is recruited into the force.

Intersting to see Henare and Brian Garder ’snickering’ when the suggestion that women sometimes make things up to get protection orders is raised.

This is ‘Eye to Eye’ from about three weeks ago

http://tvnzondemand.co.nz/content/eye_to_eye/ondemand_video_skin?tab=ONDEMAND%20NCA&sb=date-descending&e=eye_to_eye_2007_ep22#ep_eye_to_eye_2007_ep22

I draw readers’ attention to our laws on unlawful sexual connection. Note particularly the section on consent, which seems to allow almost any situation to be defined as unlawful. If you are considering having sex with someone (I will assume for this posting it is a woman), keep in mind the following information. (more…)

The following is an excerpt from the daily 3 news e-missive detailing lead stories to be seen on 6:00 pm news.

Woman jailed after drug-fuelled sex with 14-year-old

27-year-old Nelson woman Kursty Anne Hunter has been sentenced to 18 months in jail for supplying a 14-year-old boy drugs and having sex with him. The boy’s parents say they fear his childhood has been ruined forever.

I have just watched the item and was forced to utter a derisory laugh upon learning at the end of the item that the perpetrator had been granted leave to apply for home detention!

Applying artistic license here is the same scenario with a role reversal from a gender perspective:

“Man jailed after drug-fuelled sex with 14-year-old 27-year-old Nelson man K A Hunter has been sentenced to 12 years in jail for supplying a 14-year-old girl drugs and having sex with her. The girl’s parents (and lawyers and teachers and MP’s and psychiatrists and Police and doctors and anyone else who comes to mind) say they fear her childhood has been ruined forever.” Footnote: An application for home detention was declined with a stern admonishment from the judge for bringing the court into disrepute by making such submission. Instead a non-parole period of 10 years was ordered.

Commenting on boys education Republicans Education Spokesman Paul Haynes said

“The Ministerial Reference Group for Boys Education admits that even in traditionally male subjects boys are lagging behind girls, because the assessments are increasingly written and not practical.”

Full Release….